Category: News

Dr. Chang will lead the newly formed Section of Urologic Oncology within the Division of Urology in the Department of Surgery at Brigham Health.

Dr. Steven Chang is an associate surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center and is an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Chang received his medical degree from Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, and completed a urology residency as well as a urologic oncology fellowship at Stanford University Medical Center. During his fellowship training, Dr. Chang earned a Master of Science in Health Services Research from the Department of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University Medical School. He is board certified in urology.

Dr. Chang cares for patients with urologic cancers, using minimally invasive surgical approaches with laparoscopy and robotics. He is particularly interested in the management of kidney cancer and has established collaborations with medical oncologists at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center and interventional radiologists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital to treat patients with kidney tumors, ranging from incidentally detected small renal masses to metastatic renal cell carcinoma.

Dr. Chang’s research focuses on reducing the overall burden of urologic cancers on the health care system. His clinical specialties include: kidney cancer, prostate cancer, bladder cancer, adrenal cancer, testicular cancer and reconstructive kidney surgery.

Ravindra Uppaluri, MD, PhD, chief of the Division of Otolaryngology in the Department of Surgery and chief of Head and Neck Surgical Oncology at Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center, received a $4.3 million U01 Cancer Moonshot grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) for his project, “Defining Mechanisms of Immunotherapy Resistance in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinomas.”

An initiative of the NCI, the Cancer Moonshot program seeks to accelerate cancer research, aims to make more therapies available to more patients, while also improving our ability to prevent cancer and detect it at an early stage.

Uppaluri will serve as principal investigator on this project with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s David Barbie, MD, and Robert Haddad, MD. Co-Investigators include James Lederer, PhD, and Ann Marie Egloff, PhD, MPH, both of the Brigham’s Department of Surgery, and Robert Manguso, PhD, of the Broad Institute. The team seeks to understand why many patients with head and neck cancers display resistance to immunotherapy drugs, with the goal of improving treatment response rates for this patient population.

More broadly in his work at the Brigham, Uppaluri works in a close, multidisciplinary fashion with colleagues in medical and radiation oncology and neurosurgery. His clinical interests focus on head and neck malignancies including using minimally invasive transoral and endoscopic approaches. He also leads the Division of Otolaryngology. His research interests focus on basic and translational approaches to improving outcomes for patients with head and neck cancers.

The NCI is the federal government’s principal agency for cancer research and training. The mission of the NIDCR is to improve dental, oral and craniofacial health.